Is cost what determines if something is discriminatory?
No, but it is one fairly straightforward way to prove discrimination. Minorities statistically make less money on average than people in the majority (whatever that might mean in a given region of the world). Therefore, anything that costs a lot of money will probably be rarer among minorities, statistically. Therefore, one might reasonably argue that tying an otherwise unrelated service to such an expensive thing (in this case, being in college) is prima facie discriminatory until proven otherwise by some other plausible explanation for why such tying is necessary.
That "otherwise unrelated" part is critically important, of course. No one in his or her right mind would claim that Apple is discriminating against minorities for not making iOS available on low-end Android hardware, because iOS depends on the hardware, and there's a sizable cost involved in making it work on other hardware. But clearly it isn't harder or more expensive to serve coffee to non-students, nor is there any other obvious reason for the tying other than that the sponsor is only willing to pay for the personal information of college students. And I doubt that would be considered sufficient grounds for tying the two together (no pun intended).
Minorities are less likely to attend college, so there might be something there, in theory. That said, in practice, the sorts of people who hang around in coffee shops all day tend to be hipsters, and I'm pretty sure that's not a protected class.
But how much better does that influence my purchases compared to the original ad they showed me?
The value is not in showing you an ad that's more likely to influence you, but rather in not spending money to show you an ad for a product that you would never buy anyway.
New Zealand joins Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and of course the United States, forming The Paranoid Five. Everyone is out to hurt them and take away their freedom and liberty.
Hence it is of paramount importance that the government take away freedom and liberty first, to safeguard it for future generations.
Usually. But not everybody reacts to influenza differently, and different people react to different strains differently. The second time I had the Shanghai (H3N2) flu in the early 90s (same season), the first time was like you described, for more than a week. The second time was worse than a cold, but nowhere near as bad as the first round and lasted only about three or four days before I started recovering. So there's a spectrum there.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Everything you search for benefits from context. If you search for information about travel destinations and then search for Italy, you probably want tourism information, not information about its government and population. You get better results based on knowledge of those recent searches. And that context doesn't always cease to be relevant just because you closed the browser window. After all, planning a trip often takes weeks, not hours.
And just to be clear, I'm not saying all of Apple's teams are that way. I know plenty of Apple managers (at least I assume they're still Apple managers) who are great people. Unfortunately, it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the barrel, and as soon as you let enough of those sorts of people bubble up in the ranks, things start to turn sour. That's why I also know multiple Apple managers who have left Apple post-Steve, in large part because of the toxic corporate culture that has taken over.
The real problem, to be honest, is that any suitably large company will eventually become a toxic work environment unless employees from the bottom all the way up to the top actively work to keep that from happening. Apple's problem, in particular, is that it tends to promote for the wrong reasons — not because people are good leaders, but because people took credit for "hits" (whether earned or not). That sort of meritocracy doesn't really work for choosing managers. The best managers are not the people who created the tools that became the most popular, but rather those who know how to lead—how to get the best work from the people under them. That's almost completely unrelated to the outcome of projects that those people are working on, which is mostly dependent on whether the idea itself was good, how it was marketed, and other factors entirely outside the control of those managers.
Second, Apple doesn't take into account personality at all, which means cutthroat people who claim credit for things their subordinates did are more likely to get promoted higher in the ranks, and people who pass on the bulk of the credit to those subordinates get left behind. As the expression goes, "Only cream and bastards rise."
Third, Apple's corporate culture also doesn't put a high enough price on learning from mistakes. When things go wrong, they tend to look for someone to blame, for a safe place to point their fingers, rather than looking at it as an opportunity to improve their processes to prevent such failures from happening in the future. This results in, among other things, a lot of good people getting terminated or asked to resign for no good reason, a lot of institutional memory being lost, and a near complete lack of follow-through in preventing the next poor slob who holds that job from running into the same problems. And that right there is, IMO, the main reason that Apple's quality seems to be actively slipping, rather than getting better.
Fourth, Apple's corporate culture makes internal mobility hard. You basically interview for a new team in the same way that an external candidate would. This can lead to people getting stuck in a rut because changing jobs seems so daunting. And if an employee gets blamed for things going wrong, internal mobility becomes even harder, because each employee's annual review is prepared by his or her immediate manager, whose word is rarely challenged, even if unfair.
These are all problems that Tim Cook needs to solve sooner rather than later. If left to fester, they will only get worse.
It has nothing to do with SJ's ethics. SJ's personality kept a lot of people with personalities like his in line. Now, it's a lot of cutthroat people stabbing each other in the backs to get ahead. Tim just isn't enough of an a**hole to stomp that behavior into the ground, and until someone does, Apple will continue to have serious problems.
The problem with not knowing anything about the user is that it often significantly reduces the quality and usefulness of search results. For example, consider a search for "string".
When I search while logged in as me, Google returns the Java String API as the second result, because it knows that this is what I am probably looking for (though admittedly, it still doesn't recognize that I'm more likely to be asking about C++).
When I search in Safari's private browsing mode using an IP address obtained via my cell phone hot spot, the programming results don't start until the bottom few slots on the front page, and instead it talks about the textile.
Neither result set would be appropriate for both audiences. (Every now and then, this goes hilariously wrong, and I have to add "-programming" or "-science" or whatever for some search, but most of the time, it's right.)
The thing is, a lot of people complain about tracking, but the fact of the matter is that all that tracking is done to produce better outcomes for the user. Whether that data is used to improve search results or to improve ad targeting, the user benefits by getting results that are more tailored to his or her interests and seeing less crap that he or she won't have the least bit of interest in. Far from surveillance, I would call that personalization. As long as Google aggressively protects the data that they collect and keeps it private, I find it to be a good thing.
But obviously, different people have different perspectives, and some folks are more distrustful of data collection than others. For the folks on the distrustful end of the spectrum, it is good that alternatives like DDG exist. And no matter where you fall on that spectrum, I think you'll agree that there is a strong need for tough privacy laws, to ensure that if Google's management decides to retire and move to Bermuda, the next batch of execs won't be allowed to use that data in different ways that violate our privacy, such as selling it to the highest bidder, or giving it away to companies that do research for political parties, or publishing our private information for all to see.
I'd be shocked if any significant percentage of Apple's immense codebase has been rewritten in Swift. So at least from the perspective of what language Apple uses to write its software, it almost certainly is Apple's main programming language. Well, that and C and C++.
Second, Respondent's offer to sell the Disputed Domain Name to Complainant for USD 750,000 plus, among other things, eight lifetime Green Bay Packers box seats, is clearly "for valuable consideration in excess of [Respondent's] documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name," which is evidence of bad faith under paragraph 4(b)(i) of the Policy – a paragraph that includes no exception for an offer that a respondent, as here, later claims "was not meant as a serious counteroffer."
The policy in question also doesn't seem to cover this situation unless the request came prior to their announcement. After all, if it came after the announcement, then it seems reasonable for them (as Packers fans) to have assumed that the company was a shadow broker for the Packers, in which case given the obvious value of the domain to such a franchise, I would argue that that wasn't an outrageous counter.
More to the point, by interpreting that regulation in such manner, this will strongly discourage people from making counteroffers, as any counteroffer could potentially be interpreted as acting in bad faith. That is probably not what ICANN had in mind when they wrote that policy. Just saying. I think the UDRP needs to be revised.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying there wasn't bad faith. The timing is at the very least suspect. But bad faith must be proven, such as proving that the people in question had family or friends who would have known about the Packers' plans. If there isn't any plausible way for them to have found out, then as far as I'm concerned, the Packers just stole someone's domain name.
Either way, if 20th Century Fox really wanted to win the hearts and minds of every geek everywhere, they could file a claim against the domain, win it back, and give it back to the family in question. That would really shine some much need sunshine on UDRP abuse by big businesses.
I think you're missing the point - all your talk about factory costs and capex are irrelevant; SG&A doesn't include those.
According to Tesla's 10-Q, yes, it does. They attribute their increased SG&A this past quarter to "office, information technology and facilities-related expenses and sales and marketing activities to support our business expansion." And typically, factory equipment also falls under SG&A, though I guess that would have been a few quarters back.
Here's a good analysis [seekingalpha.com]...
I've skimmed that article. At an absolute minimum, this part is wrong:
2 - Tesla's business model: as opposed to other car manufacturers, Tesla does not use dealerships, so associated costs will increase with each car sold.
Tesla uses dealerships. They do not use *franchised* dealerships. The only meaningful difference between Tesla and any other car company is whether the cost of the vehicle includes padding that pays the cost of running a dealership/repair shop that is owned by a franchisee or by Tesla. The cost still has to be paid out of the cost of the car either way.
The second part is true to some extent, but that does not change the fact that the costs of setting up a dealership are greater than the cost of running it, nor the fact that the number of dealerships has to scale up quickly to achieve the desired sales volume, and won't keep growing indefinitely, but the number of vehicle sales will keep growing long past the point at which the growth in the number of dealerships tapers off. This is a simple case of profits lagging expenses.
Without a major overhaul in the process (mainly getting SG&A down to below 10% like most other car companies who push the majority SG&A to an independent dealer network), Tesla simply cannot make profit on cars.
*blink*
If Tesla had franchisees, they would have to sell them to dealers at a lower wholesale price to cover the cost of running those dealerships. And because those dealerships would have to make a profit on top of the actual cost of running the dealerships, a franchise model would mean *less* profit per car for Tesla, not more.
The fact that SG&A is scaling linearly with revenue tells us exactly nothing about whether those expenses are related to current sales or expansion designed to drive future growth. You're falling victim to a classic influxus reciproci cum hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy — that is, mistaking correlation with causation. (Apologies if my Latin is a little rusty.)
To be clear, the company is losing money. I never argued that they weren't. I said that they aren't losing money on the sales of cars. They're losing money on building out dealerships and superchargers to sell more cars, and to build manufacturing plants so that they can build more cars. All of those sorts of costs inherently must be incurred ahead of the revenue that they generate. That's simply unavoidable. But they still aren't part of the cost of building and selling the cars that people are buying today. They're part of the cost of building and selling future cars.
The reality is that the Model 3 is only going to be able to cover its R&D expenses at that price if they can get the sales volume up, which means they must either grow their sales quickly or go bankrupt. Those really are the only options. To do that, Tesla must build out the service centers and dealerships that are required for such rapid sales growth, and they must do so at a rate that is as fast as they can afford to build it out (but no faster). That means growing those expenses at a rate similar to revenue growth (and, hence, sales growth).
More to the point, this is exactly the sort of ramp up in expenses that every business goes through when it switches from selling a niche product to selling a mass-market product. The curve is steeper for Tesla, largely because of their decision to go straight from crazy-expensive cars to mass-market-priced cars in a single leap. However, these costs have been entirely predictable from the day that Tesla first announced the Model 3, and anybody who expect them wasn't paying attention.
That said, much of this is temporary. Once production volume reaches the number of units they think they can sell on a long-term basis, the manufacturing plant construction costs should basically drop to near zero, at least until the next ramp up (Model Y). Costs for building new dealerships, superchargers, and service centers will probably never go to zero, but they will almost certainly taper off at some point. And the costs of actually running those centers will obviously plateau as the number of new centers being built decreases.
My only real concern about Tesla's future prospects is whether the SEC will make good on its threat to kick Musk out, which has the potential to seriously wreck the company. (See also Apple in that middle sans-Jobs period.) Otherwise, apart from the CEO's big mouth, IMO, the company is doing exactly what it should be doing.
Tesla as a whole is losing money solely because it is spending a fortune to build the manufacturing capacity needed to meet projected future demand. This is, of course, the only sane thing they can do. The only alternative (other than going bankrupt from being unable to build enough cars to cover their R&D costs) is to outsource that manufacturing and make considerably less money per unit over the lifetime of those manufacturing facilities. As they say, you have to spend money to make money.
However, the claim was made that Tesla does not make money on their cars. That is likely false. The only meaningful way to assess Tesla's profit on the sale of a single vehicle is to add up the following costs:
labor
materials
depreciation on facilities used in manufacturing that particular car divided by the number of cars built at those facilities
R&D cost for designing the vehicle divided by the projected number of vehicles that will be sold
Obviously that last one is hard to predict definitively, but all indications point to Tesla making a decent profit per vehicle sold.
It is patently absurd to divide Tesla's CapEx expansion losses in a given year by the number of vehicles sold in that year. That's not how any sane system of accounting works. It would be like a store getting a really good deal on some non-perishable product and buying enough to sell for five years, and being accused of losing money on every item sold for the first four years. That's just silly. This is why expenses are almost always recognized in the period as the related revenues.
Thus, the company is operating at a loss, but it is not taking a loss on every vehicle sold (or any vehicle sold).
> the same company that cancelled the original Star Trek doesn't understand the geek market
CBS didn't cancel the original
D'oh! Wrong three-letter acronym.
Wait, how does CBS even have any standing to complain about this, then? I was thinking of NBC via moral rights, but CBS shouldn't have any rights whatsoever. They are just a distributor for these shows. It's Paramount's call whether to allow things like this, not CBS. They're the actual rightsholder for the show. These folks should contact Paramount and request formal permission, and then tell CBS to get bent.
Deer that aren't around humans are easier targets for hunters.
By that, I assume you mean that deer that aren't around hunters are easier targets for hunters. Deer that get used to being around (non-hunter) humans would be trivial targets for hunters. You wouldn't even need a gun.
For example, up at UC Santa Cruz, deer often graze in the grassy areas in and around the music center parking lot at about 6:30 at night. I've literally walked to within just a few feet of both fawns and does and photographed them. They usually don't even look up. I've even heard tales of students accidentally bumping into them in which the deer just turn and look, then go back to eating.
> As far as Trump and his supporters are concerned, this isn't a bug, it's a feature.
I wish I could blame Trump, but in my home state the DEMOCRATS are in control (75% majority). It was the Democrats that pushed to phase-out paper ballots (which worked perfectly) and replace them with computers (which can be hacked/miscounted).
It was also the Democrats that turned my home state into the most gerrymandered state in the country: https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Well, yeah. Whichever party is in power will pretty much do anything and everything to stay that way. So of course they want election systems that can be tampered with, and want to ensure that their people are in charge of deploying them, just in case the need arises. And of course they want things to be as gerrymandered as possible in their favor. Both parties are only against those things when the other party is in power.
And it isn't just things that affect the balance of power directly. They also pay lip service to — and occasionally pretend to try to change — certain laws only when they know they will fail — for example, the whole Roe v. Wade thing. I don't think for one minute that the Republicans will actually get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe, nor limit it meaningfully, because that brings in the evangelical Christian vote. If they ever succeed in changing that in any semi-permanent way (like rebalancing a court that changes very slowly), they lose most of their leverage. This is also why they only pass laws to ban abortion when the other party has too much power to make them actually pass.
Democrats do the same thing with gun control, passing laws that do little to solve the real problems that exist, while pretending to do something, knowing that if they ever really passed useful laws that would meaningfully reduce the number of black market guns on the streets, such as requiring guns to be locked in a gun safe that bolted to the floor when no adult member of the household is home, requiring a monitored alarm system on all homes containing guns, etc., they would gradually lose a lot of pro-gun-control voters to apathy.
So I'm with you. Politicians make me sick. The number of Democrat politicians I respect is roughly in the single digits, and the number of Republican politicians that I respect shrank from two to one about a month ago.
I half seriously want to run for office in the hopes of maybe, just maybe having one fewer politicians in office — except, of course, for the nagging fear that by doing so, I might become one. If I ever do, my theory of governance is simple:
The purpose of government is to protect the powerless from the powerful.
Any law not deriving from that is inherently a bad law. We need to reboot American politics with that theory in mind.
For example, abortion is a hard issue because there are potentially two powerless parties: the fetus and the mother (who may fear that she won't have a job if she takes time off to give birth, who may have been gotten pregnant without her consent, or who may be too young to safely give birth).
The solution, of course, is to pour research dollars into making artificial womb technology a reality. If the fetus doesn't depend on the mother to survive, this permanently destroys the right-to-life / right-to-choose false dichotomy, and the laws become entirely obvious: simultaneously ban abortion and pay for fetus transfers so long as the mother is giving up the child for adoption or such a transfer is deemed medically necessary.
We also need to reboot Congress based on sound engineering principles:
Limit the length of all bills (except, temporarily, the budget bill) to what can be reasonably read and understood by the congresspeople who are supposed to vote on it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but it is one fairly straightforward way to prove discrimination. Minorities statistically make less money on average than people in the majority (whatever that might mean in a given region of the world). Therefore, anything that costs a lot of money will probably be rarer among minorities, statistically. Therefore, one might reasonably argue that tying an otherwise unrelated service to such an expensive thing (in this case, being in college) is prima facie discriminatory until proven otherwise by some other plausible explanation for why such tying is necessary.
That "otherwise unrelated" part is critically important, of course. No one in his or her right mind would claim that Apple is discriminating against minorities for not making iOS available on low-end Android hardware, because iOS depends on the hardware, and there's a sizable cost involved in making it work on other hardware. But clearly it isn't harder or more expensive to serve coffee to non-students, nor is there any other obvious reason for the tying other than that the sponsor is only willing to pay for the personal information of college students. And I doubt that would be considered sufficient grounds for tying the two together (no pun intended).
Minorities are less likely to attend college, so there might be something there, in theory. That said, in practice, the sorts of people who hang around in coffee shops all day tend to be hipsters, and I'm pretty sure that's not a protected class.
The value is not in showing you an ad that's more likely to influence you, but rather in not spending money to show you an ad for a product that you would never buy anyway.
When anyone can become a college student for $35 a year, we'll talk. :-)
But how can they PROVE that my name isn't Seymour Butts, living at 123 Howe Now street in Brown Cow, MN?
New Zealand joins Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and of course the United States, forming The Paranoid Five. Everyone is out to hurt them and take away their freedom and liberty.
Hence it is of paramount importance that the government take away freedom and liberty first, to safeguard it for future generations.
That is not how encryption works.
My employer would have something to say about it. They would issue me burners.
Then your employer is very unusual indeed. That isn't how most of them roll in my experience.
Any company that has ever been the victim of spying by a foreign nation state tends to have policies that limit exposure to future abuse.
Just to be clear, neither do I. But it's one sure way to keep other a**holes in line.
Usually. But not everybody reacts to influenza differently, and different people react to different strains differently. The second time I had the Shanghai (H3N2) flu in the early 90s (same season), the first time was like you described, for more than a week. The second time was worse than a cold, but nowhere near as bad as the first round and lasted only about three or four days before I started recovering. So there's a spectrum there.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Everything you search for benefits from context. If you search for information about travel destinations and then search for Italy, you probably want tourism information, not information about its government and population. You get better results based on knowledge of those recent searches. And that context doesn't always cease to be relevant just because you closed the browser window. After all, planning a trip often takes weeks, not hours.
And just to be clear, I'm not saying all of Apple's teams are that way. I know plenty of Apple managers (at least I assume they're still Apple managers) who are great people. Unfortunately, it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the barrel, and as soon as you let enough of those sorts of people bubble up in the ranks, things start to turn sour. That's why I also know multiple Apple managers who have left Apple post-Steve, in large part because of the toxic corporate culture that has taken over.
The real problem, to be honest, is that any suitably large company will eventually become a toxic work environment unless employees from the bottom all the way up to the top actively work to keep that from happening. Apple's problem, in particular, is that it tends to promote for the wrong reasons — not because people are good leaders, but because people took credit for "hits" (whether earned or not). That sort of meritocracy doesn't really work for choosing managers. The best managers are not the people who created the tools that became the most popular, but rather those who know how to lead—how to get the best work from the people under them. That's almost completely unrelated to the outcome of projects that those people are working on, which is mostly dependent on whether the idea itself was good, how it was marketed, and other factors entirely outside the control of those managers.
Second, Apple doesn't take into account personality at all, which means cutthroat people who claim credit for things their subordinates did are more likely to get promoted higher in the ranks, and people who pass on the bulk of the credit to those subordinates get left behind. As the expression goes, "Only cream and bastards rise."
Third, Apple's corporate culture also doesn't put a high enough price on learning from mistakes. When things go wrong, they tend to look for someone to blame, for a safe place to point their fingers, rather than looking at it as an opportunity to improve their processes to prevent such failures from happening in the future. This results in, among other things, a lot of good people getting terminated or asked to resign for no good reason, a lot of institutional memory being lost, and a near complete lack of follow-through in preventing the next poor slob who holds that job from running into the same problems. And that right there is, IMO, the main reason that Apple's quality seems to be actively slipping, rather than getting better.
Fourth, Apple's corporate culture makes internal mobility hard. You basically interview for a new team in the same way that an external candidate would. This can lead to people getting stuck in a rut because changing jobs seems so daunting. And if an employee gets blamed for things going wrong, internal mobility becomes even harder, because each employee's annual review is prepared by his or her immediate manager, whose word is rarely challenged, even if unfair.
These are all problems that Tim Cook needs to solve sooner rather than later. If left to fester, they will only get worse.
It has nothing to do with SJ's ethics. SJ's personality kept a lot of people with personalities like his in line. Now, it's a lot of cutthroat people stabbing each other in the backs to get ahead. Tim just isn't enough of an a**hole to stomp that behavior into the ground, and until someone does, Apple will continue to have serious problems.
The problem with not knowing anything about the user is that it often significantly reduces the quality and usefulness of search results. For example, consider a search for "string".
Neither result set would be appropriate for both audiences. (Every now and then, this goes hilariously wrong, and I have to add "-programming" or "-science" or whatever for some search, but most of the time, it's right.)
The thing is, a lot of people complain about tracking, but the fact of the matter is that all that tracking is done to produce better outcomes for the user. Whether that data is used to improve search results or to improve ad targeting, the user benefits by getting results that are more tailored to his or her interests and seeing less crap that he or she won't have the least bit of interest in. Far from surveillance, I would call that personalization. As long as Google aggressively protects the data that they collect and keeps it private, I find it to be a good thing.
But obviously, different people have different perspectives, and some folks are more distrustful of data collection than others. For the folks on the distrustful end of the spectrum, it is good that alternatives like DDG exist. And no matter where you fall on that spectrum, I think you'll agree that there is a strong need for tough privacy laws, to ensure that if Google's management decides to retire and move to Bermuda, the next batch of execs won't be allowed to use that data in different ways that violate our privacy, such as selling it to the highest bidder, or giving it away to companies that do research for political parties, or publishing our private information for all to see.
I'd be shocked if any significant percentage of Apple's immense codebase has been rewritten in Swift. So at least from the perspective of what language Apple uses to write its software, it almost certainly is Apple's main programming language. Well, that and C and C++.
Second, Respondent's offer to sell the Disputed Domain Name to Complainant for USD 750,000 plus, among other things, eight lifetime Green Bay Packers box seats, is clearly "for valuable consideration in excess of [Respondent's] documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name," which is evidence of bad faith under paragraph 4(b)(i) of the Policy – a paragraph that includes no exception for an offer that a respondent, as here, later claims "was not meant as a serious counteroffer."
The policy in question also doesn't seem to cover this situation unless the request came prior to their announcement. After all, if it came after the announcement, then it seems reasonable for them (as Packers fans) to have assumed that the company was a shadow broker for the Packers, in which case given the obvious value of the domain to such a franchise, I would argue that that wasn't an outrageous counter.
More to the point, by interpreting that regulation in such manner, this will strongly discourage people from making counteroffers, as any counteroffer could potentially be interpreted as acting in bad faith. That is probably not what ICANN had in mind when they wrote that policy. Just saying. I think the UDRP needs to be revised.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying there wasn't bad faith. The timing is at the very least suspect. But bad faith must be proven, such as proving that the people in question had family or friends who would have known about the Packers' plans. If there isn't any plausible way for them to have found out, then as far as I'm concerned, the Packers just stole someone's domain name.
Either way, if 20th Century Fox really wanted to win the hearts and minds of every geek everywhere, they could file a claim against the domain, win it back, and give it back to the family in question. That would really shine some much need sunshine on UDRP abuse by big businesses.
According to Tesla's 10-Q, yes, it does. They attribute their increased SG&A this past quarter to "office, information technology and facilities-related expenses and sales and marketing activities to support our business expansion." And typically, factory equipment also falls under SG&A, though I guess that would have been a few quarters back.
I've skimmed that article. At an absolute minimum, this part is wrong:
Tesla uses dealerships. They do not use *franchised* dealerships. The only meaningful difference between Tesla and any other car company is whether the cost of the vehicle includes padding that pays the cost of running a dealership/repair shop that is owned by a franchisee or by Tesla. The cost still has to be paid out of the cost of the car either way.
The second part is true to some extent, but that does not change the fact that the costs of setting up a dealership are greater than the cost of running it, nor the fact that the number of dealerships has to scale up quickly to achieve the desired sales volume, and won't keep growing indefinitely, but the number of vehicle sales will keep growing long past the point at which the growth in the number of dealerships tapers off. This is a simple case of profits lagging expenses.
*blink*
If Tesla had franchisees, they would have to sell them to dealers at a lower wholesale price to cover the cost of running those dealerships. And because those dealerships would have to make a profit on top of the actual cost of running the dealerships, a franchise model would mean *less* profit per car for Tesla, not more.
The fact that SG&A is scaling linearly with revenue tells us exactly nothing about whether those expenses are related to current sales or expansion designed to drive future growth. You're falling victim to a classic influxus reciproci cum hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy — that is, mistaking correlation with causation. (Apologies if my Latin is a little rusty.)
To be clear, the company is losing money. I never argued that they weren't. I said that they aren't losing money on the sales of cars. They're losing money on building out dealerships and superchargers to sell more cars, and to build manufacturing plants so that they can build more cars. All of those sorts of costs inherently must be incurred ahead of the revenue that they generate. That's simply unavoidable. But they still aren't part of the cost of building and selling the cars that people are buying today. They're part of the cost of building and selling future cars.
The reality is that the Model 3 is only going to be able to cover its R&D expenses at that price if they can get the sales volume up, which means they must either grow their sales quickly or go bankrupt. Those really are the only options. To do that, Tesla must build out the service centers and dealerships that are required for such rapid sales growth, and they must do so at a rate that is as fast as they can afford to build it out (but no faster). That means growing those expenses at a rate similar to revenue growth (and, hence, sales growth).
More to the point, this is exactly the sort of ramp up in expenses that every business goes through when it switches from selling a niche product to selling a mass-market product. The curve is steeper for Tesla, largely because of their decision to go straight from crazy-expensive cars to mass-market-priced cars in a single leap. However, these costs have been entirely predictable from the day that Tesla first announced the Model 3, and anybody who expect them wasn't paying attention.
That said, much of this is temporary. Once production volume reaches the number of units they think they can sell on a long-term basis, the manufacturing plant construction costs should basically drop to near zero, at least until the next ramp up (Model Y). Costs for building new dealerships, superchargers, and service centers will probably never go to zero, but they will almost certainly taper off at some point. And the costs of actually running those centers will obviously plateau as the number of new centers being built decreases.
My only real concern about Tesla's future prospects is whether the SEC will make good on its threat to kick Musk out, which has the potential to seriously wreck the company. (See also Apple in that middle sans-Jobs period.) Otherwise, apart from the CEO's big mouth, IMO, the company is doing exactly what it should be doing.
Full disclosure: I do hold shares in TSLA.
Tesla as a whole is losing money solely because it is spending a fortune to build the manufacturing capacity needed to meet projected future demand. This is, of course, the only sane thing they can do. The only alternative (other than going bankrupt from being unable to build enough cars to cover their R&D costs) is to outsource that manufacturing and make considerably less money per unit over the lifetime of those manufacturing facilities. As they say, you have to spend money to make money.
However, the claim was made that Tesla does not make money on their cars. That is likely false. The only meaningful way to assess Tesla's profit on the sale of a single vehicle is to add up the following costs:
Obviously that last one is hard to predict definitively, but all indications point to Tesla making a decent profit per vehicle sold.
It is patently absurd to divide Tesla's CapEx expansion losses in a given year by the number of vehicles sold in that year. That's not how any sane system of accounting works. It would be like a store getting a really good deal on some non-perishable product and buying enough to sell for five years, and being accused of losing money on every item sold for the first four years. That's just silly. This is why expenses are almost always recognized in the period as the related revenues.
Thus, the company is operating at a loss, but it is not taking a loss on every vehicle sold (or any vehicle sold).
You'd be shocked to know that UCSC is a smoke-free campus now.
But yeah, it does have that reputation.
> the same company that cancelled the original Star Trek doesn't understand the geek market
CBS didn't cancel the original
D'oh! Wrong three-letter acronym.
Wait, how does CBS even have any standing to complain about this, then? I was thinking of NBC via moral rights, but CBS shouldn't have any rights whatsoever. They are just a distributor for these shows. It's Paramount's call whether to allow things like this, not CBS. They're the actual rightsholder for the show. These folks should contact Paramount and request formal permission, and then tell CBS to get bent.
All the modern Star Trek shows except for the most recent stuff were produced by Paramount. CBS just distributed them.
Dude. I've watched the deer up at UCSC actually cross at the crosswalks. They observe humans and learn more than most people might think. :-)
By that, I assume you mean that deer that aren't around hunters are easier targets for hunters. Deer that get used to being around (non-hunter) humans would be trivial targets for hunters. You wouldn't even need a gun.
For example, up at UC Santa Cruz, deer often graze in the grassy areas in and around the music center parking lot at about 6:30 at night. I've literally walked to within just a few feet of both fawns and does and photographed them. They usually don't even look up. I've even heard tales of students accidentally bumping into them in which the deer just turn and look, then go back to eating.
> As far as Trump and his supporters are concerned, this isn't a bug, it's a feature.
I wish I could blame Trump, but in my home state the DEMOCRATS are in control (75% majority). It was the Democrats that pushed to phase-out paper ballots (which worked perfectly) and replace them with computers (which can be hacked/miscounted).
It was also the Democrats that turned my home state into the most gerrymandered state in the country: https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Well, yeah. Whichever party is in power will pretty much do anything and everything to stay that way. So of course they want election systems that can be tampered with, and want to ensure that their people are in charge of deploying them, just in case the need arises. And of course they want things to be as gerrymandered as possible in their favor. Both parties are only against those things when the other party is in power.
And it isn't just things that affect the balance of power directly. They also pay lip service to — and occasionally pretend to try to change — certain laws only when they know they will fail — for example, the whole Roe v. Wade thing. I don't think for one minute that the Republicans will actually get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe, nor limit it meaningfully, because that brings in the evangelical Christian vote. If they ever succeed in changing that in any semi-permanent way (like rebalancing a court that changes very slowly), they lose most of their leverage. This is also why they only pass laws to ban abortion when the other party has too much power to make them actually pass.
Democrats do the same thing with gun control, passing laws that do little to solve the real problems that exist, while pretending to do something, knowing that if they ever really passed useful laws that would meaningfully reduce the number of black market guns on the streets, such as requiring guns to be locked in a gun safe that bolted to the floor when no adult member of the household is home, requiring a monitored alarm system on all homes containing guns, etc., they would gradually lose a lot of pro-gun-control voters to apathy.
So I'm with you. Politicians make me sick. The number of Democrat politicians I respect is roughly in the single digits, and the number of Republican politicians that I respect shrank from two to one about a month ago.
I half seriously want to run for office in the hopes of maybe, just maybe having one fewer politicians in office — except, of course, for the nagging fear that by doing so, I might become one. If I ever do, my theory of governance is simple:
The purpose of government is to protect the powerless from the powerful.
Any law not deriving from that is inherently a bad law. We need to reboot American politics with that theory in mind.
For example, abortion is a hard issue because there are potentially two powerless parties: the fetus and the mother (who may fear that she won't have a job if she takes time off to give birth, who may have been gotten pregnant without her consent, or who may be too young to safely give birth).
The solution, of course, is to pour research dollars into making artificial womb technology a reality. If the fetus doesn't depend on the mother to survive, this permanently destroys the right-to-life / right-to-choose false dichotomy, and the laws become entirely obvious: simultaneously ban abortion and pay for fetus transfers so long as the mother is giving up the child for adoption or such a transfer is deemed medically necessary.
We also need to reboot Congress based on sound engineering principles: